Cancer plasticity atlas will help predict drug response
The Wellcome Sanger Institute, Parse Biosciences, and the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich has announced a collaboration to build the foundation of a single cell atlas, focused on understanding and elucidating cancer plasticity in response to therapies.
The collaboration will catalyse an ambitious future phase to develop a cancer plasticity atlas encompassing hundreds of millions of cells.
Utilising novel organoid perturbation and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, the aim is to create a comprehensive dataset to fuel foundational drug discovery models and cancer research.
Dr Mathew Garnett, Group Leader at the Sanger Institute, and Professor Fabian Theis, Director of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and Associate Faculty at the Sanger Institute, will be the principal investigators in the collaboration. The initiative will be run through Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab.
The Sanger, Helmholtz Munich, and Parse teams have developed automated methods to streamline laboratory procedures in addition to the computational methods required to analyse and discover insights within datasets of this size.
The aim of the collaboration is to build a single cell reference map that will enable virtual cell modelling and potentially help predict the effect of drugs in cancer patients – where resistance might develop, from which compounds, and where to target future treatment efforts.
Garnett, Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and collaboration co-lead, said: “We have developed a transformational platform to enable both large-scale organoid screening and the downstream data generation and analysis which has the potential to redefine our understanding of therapeutic responses in cancer. We aim to develop a community that brings the best expertise from academia and industry to progress the project. Studies of this magnitude are critical to the development of foundational models to better help us understand cancer progression and bring much needed advancement in the field.”
DIANA SPENCER, Senior Digital Content Editor, DDW